Displaying posts published in

August 2017

MY SAY: ON THE MEDIA

First: Farewell to the print Village Voice which had the best columns on jazz of any paper while Nathan “Nat” Irving Hentoff was a columnist from 1958 to 2009.

Second: I am reminded of Nixon’s disgraced vice -president Spiro Agnew’s phrase describing an acrimonious media as ” the nattering nabobs of negativism.” It is claimed that the late columnist William Safire wrote those words for Agnew.

Third: George Orwell’s pithy quote on the media: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”

Fourth: If a tree falls in the forest and the mainstream media does not report it, did it happen? rsk with apologies to Geroge Berkeley (1710)

Russian ambassadors keep dying in mysterious ways Daniel Brown

Russia’s ambassador to Sudan was found floating dead in a swimming pool in his Khartoum home on Wednesday.

Mirgayas Shirinskiy, 63, “was found in his residence with evidence of an acute heart attack,” Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry,told BBC on Thursday.

While the cause of death is initially being considered natural, since Shirinskiysuffered from high blood pressure, seven Russian ambassadors have died in mysterious ways over the last two years.

Two of them died from heart attacks, and Shirinsky would be the third.

Most notable was former Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, who died of a heart attack in February in New York. The US State Department asked the New York City medical examiner’s office to not release his autopsy.

Roman Skrynikov, the former Russian ambassador to Kazakhstan, also died of an apparent heart attack in December 2016.

Five other prominent Russians, besides the three ambassadors, have also died of apparent heart attacks in the last 14 years, Buzzfeed News and USA Today previously reported, and Russia is possibly behind dozens of other mysterious deaths outside its borders in that time.

What’s concerning here is that Russia, according to Richard Walton, Scotland Yard’s former counter-terror commander, is skilled at “disguising murder” by using biological or chemical agents that leave no trace.

Like Alexander Perepilichnyy, a former Russian financier who was about to shed light on a $230 million money laundering operation perpretated by the Russian mafia and government officials.

His 2012 death in Great Britain has initially ruled a heart attack by the police, but an investigator later found trace amounts of Himalayan gelsemium elegans plant in his system, which can cause cardiac arrest.

Still, natural causes could easily be the cause in any number of these cases, given Russia’s demographics.

“There are simply a lot of really weird coincidences in this world,” Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, an intelligence expert at the Harvard Kennedy School, told the Washington Post.

“That said, I think there’s a story here that deserves deeper investigation,” Mowatt-Larssen told the Post, adding that while “eliminating a diplomat is rare … Putin might love the fact that his diplomats are fearful of him — he might find that quite convenient.”

The Unbearable Lightness of Confederate-Statue Removal Banning them will do bupkis for blacks. By Deroy Murdock

To update an old joke, removing Confederate statues is a bit like wetting one’s self in a dark suit: It offers a warm feeling but little of lasting value.

The erasist frenzy to tear down Confederate monuments is accelerating at the speed of mob rule. What began in April with New Orleans’s planned-if-ill-advised banishment of statues of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and generals P. G. T Beauregard and Robert E. Lee has devolved into vandalism.

Hooligans in Durham, N.C., on August 14 toppled a statue of a graycoat from a pedestal, from which it crashed, crumpled, and was spat upon.

Bone-headed Atlanta rioters attacked and damaged what they reckoned was a Confederate memorial. In fact, as the Journal-Constitution explained, the Peace Monument “features an angel standing above a Confederate soldier, guiding him to lay down his weapon.” Oops. Never mind!

Houston police arrested Andrew Schneck, 25, at the statue of Confederate general Richard Dowling. Officials say that Schneck had enough materials with him “to produce a viable explosive device.” These included nitro glycerine and hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, both of which are designed to go ka-boom. Schneck, who was on five years’ probation after pleading guilty to federal explosives charges in 2014, lives in his mother’s home. That’s where, she says, he conducts “chemistry experiments.”

The old-guard media nearly fainted when President Donald J. Trump said on August 15, “This week, it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You really do have to ask yourself, ‘Where does it stop?’”

But within a few hours of making these “off the rails” and “unhinged” remarks, Trump was vindicated. The Left made precisely the demands that he predicted.

As Fox News’s Jesse Watters noted, Al Sharpton shared his thoughts about the Jefferson Memorial with PBS’s Charlie Rose that evening. “Public monuments are supported by public funds. You are asking me to subsidize the insult of my family.” Referring to Jefferson’s slave ownership, Sharpton added: “The public should not be paying to uphold somebody who had that kind of background.”

Vice News last Thursday headlined Wilbert L. Cooper’s op-ed as follows: “Let’s blow up Mount Rushmore” — the South Dakota landmark where Washington and Jefferson are captured in stone. The website changed that to “Let’s Get Rid of Mount Rushmore” and lamented that “the use of ‘blow up’ in the original headline as a rhetorical device was misguided and insensitive” — insensitivity being among the Left’s cardinal sins. Cooper’s article mocks “Abe Lincoln squatting on his (recently vandalized) throne [and] George Washington’s phallus towering over everything in DC.”

“I don’t care if it’s a George Washington statue or a Thomas Jefferson statue or a Robert E. Lee statue,” political commentor Angela Rye declared the same day on CNN. “They all need to come down.”

And why stop with slave owners?

Trump’s Evil Empire Trump rode his mutual enmity with the media to the White House. By Rich Lowry

For many Republicans, what matters most about Donald Trump is that he’s demonstrated resolve against the enemy — not the Islamic State or the Taliban, but the media.

The media has become for the Right what the Soviet Union was during the Cold War — a common, unifying adversary of overwhelming importance. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, religious conservatives and libertarians could agree that, whatever their other differences, godless communism had to be resisted. This commitment was the glue of the GOP coalition, and the basic price of admission to conservatism.

Now, a policy of containment, preferably rollback, of the mainstream media occupies that central role. Trump may not be delivering on his agenda, but he’s a righteous, unyielding warrior against the media. And this is the one nonnegotiable. To put it in terms of the famous Isaiah Berlin essay, the fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one thing — CNN sucks.

The Right’s hostility toward the media is long-standing. In fact, no one has improved on what Spiro Agnew said in a famous speech in Des Moines, Iowa, in November 1969, or even really said anything new.

Agnew complained that after President Richard Nixon gave a televised speech, his words were instantly subjected to “querulous criticism.” He pointed out that the media is in a bubble, living “in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C., or New York City.” And he wanted to limit the power of this “small and unelected elite.”

Newt Gingrich demonstrated the transformative potential of theatrical attacks on the media in his show-stopping performances at two South Carolina primary debates in 2012. He wouldn’t have won the state without them.

Trump’s insight was basically, “What if every day were like that?” After witnessing the fate of two candidates who got savage coverage in the general election, despite being a media darling in the case of John McCain and being an earnest, well-meaning man in the case of Mitt Romney, Republican voters were ready for harsher stuff.

Trump had long had his own problems with the media, namely that it wasn’t nearly favorable enough to Donald Trump. With his talents as a showman, his taste for combat and his instinct for what energizes an audience, he was ideally suited to transfer his long-developed personal sensitivity to slights from reporters to the ideological realm of Republican presidential politics. In large part, he rode his mutual enmity with the media to the White House.

It remains a lifeline. Most commentators saw Trump angrily saying indefensible things about Charlottesville at the news conference last week; most Republicans saw him gamely standing his ground in front a group of braying reporters. At his rally in Phoenix, Trump upped the rhetorical ante and used the media’s lack of credibility to try to undermine the critique of his Charlottesville remarks.

It helps him that the press is, indeed, worse than ever before. As the media environment has fractured, organizations feel less obligation to try to cultivate a broader audience. And as politics becomes more culturally charged, the divide between the heartland and the coasts where the media lives and works becomes important.

The Persecution of Patriot Prayer Democrats green-light violence by smearing mainstream group rallying in San Francisco as neo-Nazis. Matthew Vadum

Democrat politicians like Nancy Pelosi have given their ultra-violent “antifa” allies permission to use physical violence against the Patriot Prayer group rallying in a San Francisco park on Saturday by smearing them as “Nazi sympathizers.”

The story of Oregon-based Patriot Prayer is a case study in the power of propaganda in generating leftist mass hysteria. It is also a reaffirmation that everyone has First Amendment rights in America, except for non-leftists. Leftists are already planning riots. One of the more cowardly leftists intends to cover the rally site at Crissy Field inside San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area near the Golden Gate Bridge in dog feces.

Offering no evidence whatsoever of the Tea Party-ish group’s background or intentions, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, who represents San Francisco, said Crissy Field “is not a place for Nazi sympathizers to come and spew their negative message.”

Especially since Donald Trump became president, the Left has been deliberately, maliciously, conflating peaceful, pro-Constitution conservative and Tea Party groups with violent, statist neo-Nazis and those affiliated with them.

Pelosi has been bloviating about Patriot Prayer’s rally permit for some time, a permit granted only after the group agreed to ban guns, tiki torches, and other objects that can be used as weapons at the event.

Pelosi trashed the feds on August 15 for granting the permit, making the outrageously defamatory claim that Patriot Prayer is secretly a despicable hate group.

“The National Park Service’s decision to permit a white supremacist rally … raises grave and ongoing concerns about public safety,” the 77-year-old latte leftist said in a statement.

“Free speech does not grant the right to yell fire in a crowded theater, incite violence or endanger the public in any venue,” she said, going on to “wonder” whether the decision to allow the “white supremacist rally” was made “under guidance from the White House?” She also called into question the NPS’s ability “to ensure public safety during a white supremacist rally.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) wrote a letter earlier this month urging the NPS to deny Patriot Prayer a permit rally. “I am alarmed at the prospect that Crissy Field will be used as a venue for Patriot Prayer’s incitement, hate, and intimidation,” wrote the 84-year-old lawmaker who, for what it’s worth, at times seems like an ardent conservative compared to California’s junior senator, Kamala Harris (D).

Conspiracy theorist and congresswoman, Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), said the upcoming rally isn’t about free speech at all.

What they’re really doing is really manipulating. They have small numbers and small resources, and they see this is an opportunity to go to very blue areas where they will not be met with warmth and revelry and try to gin up more support for their organization with numbers and with monies.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), a known Communist sympathizer, seemed to say she won’t be upset if a so-called alt-right event set for Sunday at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park is shut down.

“Berkeley is the center really of the free speech movement and the peace movement, Lee said. “And so there’s no way that we are not going to say we’re united against hate.”

Iran Makes Mockery Of Nuclear Deal Time for a serious reassessment. Ari Lieberman

Things are unfolding rapidly in Syria as relentless offensives, undertaken by the joint might of Iran, Russia and Hezbollah against a plethora of rival Sunni militias, have taken their toll on the rebels. Analysts are fearful that the pending fall of Islamic State, which seems likely, will create a vacuum that the Islamic Republic will rush to fill. This coupled with the recent revelation that the United States terminated a covert military aid program to rebels seeking to topple Assad, virtually ensures that Iran will remain a dominant power in Syria. A troubling consequence of this development is that Iran will have essentially succeeded in creating a land bridge of sorts that travels through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea, a prospect that is inimical to both U.S and Israeli interests.

Israel is cognizant of the fact that as a result of the leadership vacuum created by the Obama administration, Moscow now pulls the strings in Syria. It also understands that the U.S. decision to terminate funding for certain Syrian rebel groups signals that the U.S. has limited its immediate aims in Syria to toppling the Islamic State. Malign Iranian and Hezbollah influences appear to have become secondary concerns. For good reason, Israel views Iran’s entrenchment in Syria as a direct strategic threat and regional challenge. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his concerns to Vladimir Putin in a meeting between the two leaders which took place on Wednesday in Sochi. Russia’s ambassador to Israel, Alexander Petrovich Shein, noted that Russia would take Israeli interests into consideration when dealing with Syria.

While Iran’s cancerous spread of its hegemony is disconcerting, equally alarming is its continued violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also informally known as the Iran deal. The disastrous and dangerous Iran deal, mendaciously orchestrated by the Obama administration and sold to the American public through half-truths, cynical exploitation of the media and use of “echo chambers,” poses serious challenges to the Trump administration.

Twice since the signing of the accord, Iran has exceeded the JCPOA’s prescribed limitations on heavy water production, and according to German intelligence, Iran continues to utilize front companies in efforts to purchase high-tech equipment for use in nuclear weapon and ballistic missile development. Moreover, Iran’s secretive Parchin facility, where the Islamic Republic conducts its most secretive nuclear experiments, continues to remain off limits to international inspectors. But Iranian malfeasance does not end there.

According to a report compiled by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Iran, in flagrant violation of the JCPOA, has been using commercial airliners to transport Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen and proxy militias to various Mideast hotspots including Syria. Photos obtained by the FDD, and forwarded to congressional leaders show militia fighters affiliated with the Fatemiyoun Brigade, an Afghan Shiite militia, seated in an Iranian commercial airliner bound for Syria. The aircraft belongs to Iran Air, a purported Iranian civilian airliner, and its logo is clearly visible in the photo.

U.N. Issues ‘Warning’ To U.S. on Charlottesville Hypocrites lecture America on “hate speech.” Joseph Klein

The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, acting under its “Early Warning and Urgent Action Procedures,” intervened in the ongoing controversy over the deadly violence in Charlottesville and the Trump administration’s response. The urgent warning procedure is supposed to short circuit the normal periodic country human rights review process, which takes place about every five years. It is to be invoked only in those situations that could “spiral into terrible events” and require immediate action, according to Anastasia Crickley, chair of the committee, which monitors implementation of the global convention on prohibiting racial discrimination.

The early warning procedure has been used only 20 times since 2003. It was invoked two times regarding Sudan in 2004 and 2005 without any specific condemnation of the Sudanese leaders for their racist incitements and ethnic cleaning. It was used twice to condemn a law in Israel, the UN’s perennial punching bag, which restricted marriage between an Israeli citizen and a person residing in the West Bank or Gaza. The procedure was used once before in 2006 regarding the United States when the committee criticized the U.S. government for not respecting the alleged rights of an Indian tribe. Moral equivalence was the UN committee’s calling card then and it remains so today.

Indeed, the UN committee was so anxious to pillory the Trump administration that it decided to lump the United States together with Burundi, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan and Nigeria as the only UN member states, out of a total of 193 states, meriting its “early warning” notice during the last decade.

“We are alarmed by the racist demonstrations, with overtly racist slogans, chants and salutes by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan, promoting white supremacy and inciting racial discrimination and hatred,” said Ms. Crickley. “We call on the US Government to investigate thoroughly the phenomenon of racial discrimination targeting, in particular, people of African descent, ethnic or ethno-religious minorities, and migrants,” she added.

The UN committee demanded that the “highest level politicians and officers” of the United States government “unequivocally and unconditionally reject and condemn racist hate speech and racist crimes in Charlottesville and throughout the country.” While not mentioning President Trump by name, he was the committee’s obvious target of criticism for not going far enough in “unequivocally condemning” the events in Charlottesville, as Ms. Crickley herself declared.

The UN committee also recommended that there be some constraints on the rights of free speech and assembly so that they are not abused to promote “racist hate speech” or used to destroy the rights of others to “equality and non-discrimination.” The committee chair, Ms. Crickley, elaborated on this point in remarks quoted by the New York Times.

“We believe it is time that the United States considered these matters and considered seriously that balance, between freedom of expression and hate speech,” Ms. Crickley said. “Whether freedom to publicly and collectively express neo-Nazi views and to chant racist hate speech in effect constitutes freedom of expression — I think that’s a question that needs to be seriously addressed in the U.S.A.”

Lincoln’s Greatest Speech Frederick Douglass called it “a sacred effort,” and Lincoln himself thought that his Second Inaugural, which offered a theodicy of the Civil War, was better than the Gettysburg Address Garry Wills

Written in September 1999 by Garry Wills. professor and historian…….

MARCH 4, 1865, the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration as President, began in a driving rain that raddled Washington’s famously muddy thoroughfares — women would wear the mud caked to their long dresses throughout the day’s ceremonies. Walt Whitman saw Lincoln’s carriage dash through the rain “on sharp trot” from the White House to the Capitol, scene of the swearing-in. He thought Lincoln might have preceded the tacky parade in order to avoid association with a muslin Temple of Liberty or a pasteboard model of the ironclad Monitor. Though Whitman was a close observer of the President, and would shadow him throughout this day, there was no way for Lincoln to recognize him in the crowd.

It was otherwise with Frederick Douglass. After the parade had arrived at the Capitol’s east portico and the presidential company had come out, Lincoln recognized the civil-rights leader from Douglass’s earlier visits to the White House. He pointed him out to Andrew Johnson, who had just been sworn in as Vice President in the Senate chamber. Douglass thought Johnson looked drunk, but did not know what a fool the Tennessean had made of himself after taking the oath. After Johnson had given a rambling and slurred speech attacking privilege, he melodramatically waved the Bible in the air and passionately kissed it. Benjamin Butler, of Massachusetts, who later led the impeachment effort against Johnson, said in a public speech that the Vice President “slobbered the Holy Book with a drunken kiss.” Lincoln, who studiously avoided looking up during Johnson’s odd performance in the Senate, quietly told the parade marshal, “Do not let Johnson speak outside.” Perhaps Lincoln was trying to be compensatorily reassuring when he made conversation with Johnson by pointing out Douglass. But Johnson’s disoriented sullenness came out as pure hate when this former slave owner looked at the escaped slave who was now a celebrity. Douglass recorded the instant.

The first expression which came to his face, and which I think was the true index of his heart, was one of bitter contempt and aversion. Seeing that I observed him, he tried to assume a more friendly appearance, but it was too late; it is useless to close the door when all within has been seen.

Much of future tragedy could be glimpsed in that silent exchange of glances — and much of the problem Lincoln faced in framing a speech for this occasion. Johnson, who had served as governor of the border state of Tennessee, was just one of the many compromises Lincoln had been forced to make in his attempt to shorten the war and make reintegration of the nation possible. It is easy for us to think of reconstructing the nation as a task that came after the war. But Lincoln faced problems of reconstruction soon after the war began. He had to govern sectors recaptured from the South, to keep border states from joining the rebellion, and to woo wavering parts of the southern coalition. All this involved the use of carrots as well as sticks — promises of amnesty, discussion of gradual emancipation, bargaining over things like black suffrage. These in turn alienated the radical Republicans, who wanted no compromise on the question of slavery or black civil rights.

This was a fight that could not be delayed until the war was over, and it flared up most bitterly after the occupation of New Orleans, in May of 1862. Lincoln hoped to make Louisiana, with its high percentage of educated freemen, a showcase of the way the South could be reunited with the North on the basis of a free black work force. But when congressmen were elected by Louisiana’s provisional government, which seemed too conservative to Congress, they were not initially seated, and Congress continued with its own plan of reconstruction, entertaining such notions as that southern state lines should be erased and the conquered area territorialized. Lincoln feared that such congressional initiatives would reduce his flexibility in trying to bargain with the South. He placated the radicals with his Emancipation Proclamations (provisional on September 22, 1862, final on January 1, 1863) enough to be able to make his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction on December 8, 1863. It readmitted any state that could form a government of at least 10 percent of the electorate which was willing to take an oath of allegiance to the Union and to accept the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln’s proposal failed to affect the nettlesome problems in Louisiana (the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to those parts of Louisiana that were not formally out of the Union when it was issued). In December of 1864 Lincoln was still protesting to critics that his approach to Louisiana was merely a temporary expedient for putting the state back in operation, and that ” we can never finish this, if we never begin it.”

People were laboring through all these controversies as they labored through the mud to Lincoln’s inaugural ceremony. The end of the war was in sight — Lee would surrender at Appomattox a mere five weeks after the inauguration. But what would be done with that victory? Lincoln’s appeal for latitude in the use of executive power, on the grounds that it was needed for waging the war, would lose all force when the guns fell silent. What new authority would he argue for to reach new goals? This was as thorny a situation, in its own way, as that which Lincoln had addressed in his lengthy First Inaugural. Then he had had to explain what terms he would accept for maintaining peace (including a promise to leave slavery perpetually undisturbed where it already existed) and what terms he would not accept (secession). That was a legal argument, involving constitutional philosophy, with many fine distinctions to be sharply drawn. If anything, the legal problems were even more complex in 1865. Would the Confederacy be a conquered nation? Or would it be a continuing part of America, in which some had committed crimes and others were innocent? How could the guilty be distinguished from the innocent, for assigning proper punishments or rewards? On what timetable? Under whose supervision? Using what instruments of discipline or reform (trials, oaths of allegiance, perpetual disqualification for office)? And what of the former slaves? Were they to be allowed suffrage, indemnified for losses, given lands forfeited by the rebels, guaranteed work and workers’ rights? The problems were endless, and the very norms for discussing them were still to be agreed on. Lincoln had his work cut out for him, and his audience could reasonably expect a serious engagement with matters that were haunting everyone on the eve of victory.

MANY-LAYERED MEANING

ONLY against the backdrop of such concerns can we appreciate the daring, almost the effrontery, of the Second Inaugural’s most obvious characteristic — its extreme brevity. It is true that the Gettysburg Address is even briefer (272 words to the Inaugural’s 703), but that was given at a ceremonial occasion for which Lincoln was not even the principal speaker. No one expected serious discussion of national imperatives when the business of the day was honoring fallen soldiers. It is a different matter when a presidential address is given during a war that is collapsing into a potentially more divisive peace. Yet Lincoln almost breezily dismissed questions of both war and peace, saying that nothing in either called for lengthy treatment. Was he not able to appreciate the scale of the difficulties facing him? Did he think he could reduce them to manageable size by ignoring or belittling them?

That this bold defiance of expectation was deliberate is clear from the pride Lincoln took in this speech. Some have wondered if he realized what a masterpiece he had created at Gettysburg. He clearly knew that he had done well; but he expected to do even better in the years ahead — years he would not be given. He believed he had already equaled or surpassed the Gettysburg Address at least once — in his Second Inaugural. Eleven days after delivering it he wrote to Thurlow Weed, the Republican organizer in New York, that he expected it to “wear as well as — perhaps better than — any thing I have produced.”

Yet if this later speech was better than the earlier one, that was because it built on the earlier one. At Gettysburg, Lincoln had proved to himself and others the virtues of economy in the use of words. He had put many-layered meaning in lapidary form. He aspired to the same thing in his inaugural speech. This is the more surprising when we consider the full-blown nature of most nineteenth-century oratory, and the fact that Presidents had so few opportunities for making speeches at that time. They did not deliver their annual messages to Congress in person. They did not address the conventions that nominated them. They could address groups that came to visit them in Washington, but Lincoln tried to avoid impromptu statements. All the words of a man in his position had to be well considered. He had denied himself the chance to make campaign speeches in both his presidential races, for fear of saying something divisive. All this must have been frustrating to Lincoln, who knew well the power of his oratory — what it had accomplished in the “House Divided” speech and the Douglas debates of 1858, and the Cooper Union speech in 1860, and at Gettysburg in 1863. The temptation must have been strong to load his inaugural address with everything he had been wanting to say. Here, at last, was his opportunity, too good to be wasted, and at just the moment when major issues were being hotly debated and an intervention by the President was desired.

The first thing to admire, then, is the discipline that kept him from saying anything more than what he considered essential, just as at Gettysburg. The earlier speech was a model for more than its brevity. He used the same rhetorical ploy to begin the two addresses. At Gettysburg he would not dedicate the battlefield, though he admitted that that was “altogether fitting and proper.” In the Second Inaugural he would not make an extended speech, though he conceded that doing so had been “fitting and proper” at his first inauguration. (The phrase “fitting and proper,” occurring in these two short addresses, thus ends up being repeated in the inscriptions on the Lincoln Memorial.) Familiarity with both speeches has made us appreciate too little how unexpected this approach was at the time.

We most easily read Lincoln’s refusal to dedicate the battlefield as acting like a praeteritio in rhetoric: “I will not mention … ” But it has been mentioned in the very statement that refuses mention, and that device draws more attention, after all, to the “unmentioned” thing. So we expect Lincoln to say that he will not dedicate in some sense or other, leaving the impression of dedication at a deeper level. But Lincoln was not doing anything so tame. He did not distinguish different kinds of dedication. He turned the whole subject upside down: We cannot dedicate the field. The field must dedicate us.

THE defiance of expectation is not so obvious in the Second Inaugural, but it is clearly there, and is carefully stated in order to exclude things that people wanted Lincoln to say. He said that he would not speak at length, as he did in the First Inaugural (when he was “loth to close”), when there were important things to discuss. Now, in contrast (and this had to be a shocker to some people), there was nothing useful to say about the war. It took its course, and he did not even pretend to be steering it anymore, much less to predict the time of its conclusion.

The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

That impersonal last sentence, with its dangling prepositional phrase, reflects the nonassertiveness that Lincoln wanted to recommend at this point. To show that predictions were worthless, he pointed out how little the war’s development had been, or could have been, predicted.

Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.

With the end in sight, Lincoln did not voice the expectable, even forgivable, emotion that most leaders would in such a situation — a declaration that the rightful cause had triumphed, as it must. “The prayers of both [sides] could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.” To Lincoln, as he looked back, even his First Inaugural seemed to have been an exercise in futility.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil-war. All dreaded it — all sought to avert it. While the inaugeral [sic] address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war — seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

Events were beyond anyone’s control. War came of itself, the personified process overriding personal agents.

What was going on here? His audience had a right to think Lincoln disingenuous when he said there were no thorny policy problems to be addressed now, as there had been in the First Inaugural. His words sound almost eerily “above it all.” As the historian David Donald says, “It was a remarkably impersonal address. After the opening paragraph, Lincoln did not use the first-person-singular pronoun, nor did he refer to anything he had said or done during the previous four years.” Lincoln was hardly the one to say that no great issues were resolved by the war, or that high ideals should not be used for guidance in the waging of peace. His Gettysburg Address had been sweeping in its claims — that the war would demonstrate whether all men are created equal, and would determine whether popular government could long endure. Now he was expressing an agnosticism about human purpose in general, and a submission to inscrutable providence. This resigned mood seems inappropriate for bracing people to the task of rebuilding a nation — a nation bloodily wrenched from all normal politics and facing problems without precedent.

“PRACTICAL RELATIONS”

BUT it was precisely because he saw the staggering size of the problems that had to be addressed that he was setting a mood of pragmatic accommodation to each challenge as it came up. Doctrinaire approaches, he was sure, would lead to fighting the war over again in peacetime — which is what happened during Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson. Some people argued that the South had committed treason, had withdrawn from the Union, and should be treated like any conquered nation. Others felt that the southern states were never out of the Union, and that their citizens’ rights should be respected even as criminal acts were punished (mainly by the defeat itself). Though Lincoln believed that the states had not seceded because legally they could not, he did not want to let the discussion reach for grand theories or ultimate principles, since that would make the problems of living together again irresolvable. The Second Inaugural was meant, with great daring, to spell out a principle of not acting on principle. In the nation’s murky situation all principles — except this one of forgoing principle — were compromised. He was giving a basis for the pragmatic position he had taken in the Proclamation of Amnesty, which was deliberately shortsighted, looking only a step at a time down the long, hard road ahead. He defended that proclamation again in the last speech he gave, a month after the Second Inaugural. Speaking from a White House window to a crowd celebrating the war’s end, he read carefully written words.

AMERICA’S NEW CIVIL WAR

The papers of late have been peppered with reports detailing how America is coming apart at the seams under the presidency of Donald Trump, the most recent accusation being that he sided with Klansmen against decent, upright advocates of racial equality in the aftermath of the Charlottesville riots. No surprise there, as Mr Trump could cure cancer and still find himself accused of putting nurses and doctors out of work, so the charge that he is soft on the Confederacy was no less expected than the media’s painting of masked Antifa thugs and Black Lives Matter incendiarists as blameless agents of tranquil amity.

As statues of Robert E. Lee and other Civil War figures come down on what is now a daily schedule, it might disconcert your typical arts-grad newsroom fixture to learn that another president was even more accommodating of Secessionists. From Ulysses S. Grant, as told to an American journalist, a memory of the Confederate surrender at the Appomattox courthouse:

On the night before Lee’s surrender,” said General Grant, “I had a wretched headache — headaches to which I have been subject — nervous prostration, intense personal suffering. But, suffer or not, I had to keep moving. I saw clearly, especially after Sheridan had cut off the escape to Danville, that Lee must surrender or break and run into the mountains — break in all directions and leave us a dozen guerilla bands to fight. The object of my campaign was not Richmond, not the defeat of Lee in actual fight, but to remove him and his army out of the contest, and, if possible, to have him use his influence in inducing the surrender of Johnston and the other isolated armies.

You see, the war was an enormous strain upon the country. Rich as we were I do not now see how we could have endured it another year, even from a financial point of view. So with these views I wrote Lee, and opened the correspondence with which the world is familiar. Lee does not appear well in that correspondence, not nearly so well as he did in our subsequent interviews, where his whole bearing was that of a patriotic and gallant soldier, concerned alone for the welfare of his army and his state. I received word that Lee would meet me at a point within our lines near Sheridan’s head-quarters.

I had to ride quite a distance through a muddy country. I remember now that I was concerned about my personal appearance. I had an old suit on, without my sword, and without any distinguishing mark of rank except the shoulder-straps of a lieutenant-general on a woolen blouse. I was splashed with mud in my long ride. I was afraid Lee might think I meant to show him studied discourtesy by so coming — at least I thought so. But I had no other clothes within reach, as Lee’s letter found me away from my base of supplies. I kept on riding until I met Sheridan. The general, who was one of the heroes of the campaign, and whose pursuit of Lee was perfect in its generalship and energy, told me where to find Lee. I remember that Sheridan was impatient when I met him, anxious and suspicious about the whole business, feared there might be a plan to escape, that he had Lee at his feet, and wanted to end the business by going in and forcing an absolute surrender by capture. In fact, he had his troops ready for such an assault when Lee’s white flag came within his lines.

I went up to the house where Lee was waiting. I found him in a fine, new, splendid uniform, which only recalled my anxiety as to my own clothes while on my way to meet him. I expressed my regret that I was compelled to meet him in so unceremonious a manner, and he replied that the only suit he had available was one which had been sent him by some admirers in Baltimore, and which he then wore for the first time. We spoke of old friends in the army. I remembered having seen Lee in Mexico. He was so much higher in rank than myself at the time that I supposed he had no recollection of me. But he said he remembered me very well. We talked of old times and exchanged inquiries about friends. Lee then broached the subject of our meeting.

I told him my terms, and Lee, listening attentively, asked me to write them down. I took out my ‘manifold’ order-book and pencil and wrote them down. General Lee put on his glasses and read them over. The conditions gave the officers their side-arms, private horses, and personal baggage. I said to Lee that I hoped and believed this would be the close of the war; that it was most important that the men should go home and go to work, and the government would not throw any obstacles in the way. Lee answered that it would have a most happy effect, and accepted the terms.

Anti-Semitism in Europe: New Official Report by Bruce Bawer

Examining statistics from France, Britain, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Russia, Enstad points out that one of these seven countries “clearly stands out with a very low number” of anti-Semitic incidents despite its “relatively large Jewish population…”

Absurdly, whenever a perpetrator draws a swastika, the Swedish government automatically considers it a “right-wing” act.

Enstad concludes that right-wingers, in all four of the major Western European countries in his study, “constitute a clear minority of perpetrators.” Indeed, “in France, Sweden and the UK (but not in Germany) the perpetrator was perceived to be left-wing more often than right-wing.”

To some of us, it is hardly a secret that anti-Semitic violence is on the rise in Europe, or that the chief perpetrators are Muslims. But many politicians and news media have been so indefatigable in their efforts to obscure this uncomfortable fact that one is always grateful for official — or, at least, semi-official — confirmation of what everyone already knows.

It is a pleasure, then, to report that a new study, Antisemitic Violence in Europe, 2005-2015 — written by Johannes Due Enstad of the Oslo-based Center for Studies of the Holocaust and the University of Oslo, and jointly published by both institutions — is refreshingly, even startlingly, honest about its subject. Enstad notes that while anti-Semitic violence has declined in the U.S. since 1994, it has been on the rise worldwide. That, of course, includes Europe — most of it, anyway.

Examining statistics from France, Britain, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Russia, Enstad points out that one of these seven countries “clearly stands out with a very low number” of anti-Semitic incidents despite its “relatively large Jewish population”; the country in question, he adds, “is also the only case in which there is little to indicate that Jews avoid displaying their identity in public.” In addition, it is the only one of the six countries in which the majority of perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence are not Muslims. Which country is Enstad referring to? Russia.

That Russia is relatively free of anti-Semitic violence may sound surprising to anyone familiar with the words Cossack and refusenik, but it actually makes sense. Would-be Jew-bashers in Russia know that if they’re arrested for committing acts of violence, the consequences won’t be pretty. In western Europe, by contrast, the courts are lenient, the terms of confinement short, and the prisons extremely comfortable. And while Muslims know that they are a protected class in Western Europe, able to commit all kinds of transgressions with near-impunity, that is far from being the case in Putin’s Russia.

If Muslims do not dominate the anti-Semitic crime statistics in Russia, who does? The answer: right-wing extremists. Although politicians and the media in Western Europe like to talk as if Jews (and others) in their countries are principally endangered by the far-right, Russia is, in fact, the only one of the seven countries in Enstad’s study in which that group does play a significant role in anti-Semitic acts.

What about the other countries? Denmark has few Jews, and Norway even fewer, so these two countries play a relatively minor role in Enstad’s study. That leaves Germany, Britain, France, and Sweden. Nearly 10% of French Jews say they have been physically attacked for being Jewish during the past five years; in Germany and Sweden the figure is about 7.5%, in Britain nearly 5%. Asked how often they “avoid visiting Jewish events or sites” for fear of danger, 7.9% of Jews in Sweden say they do so frequently, followed by their coreligionists in France, Germany, and Britain (where the number is only 1.2%). Asked if they “avoid wearing, carrying or displaying things” in public that would identify them as Jews, 60% of Swedish Jews say they do so “all the time” or “frequently,” with, again, France, Germany, and Britain following in that order.

Almost 50% of French Jews have considered emigrating because they feel imperiled in their own country; for Germany the figure is 25%, and for Sweden and Britain it is just under 20%.

Enstad weighs official statistics from all of the countries under examination, but finds that while those from most of the countries essentially jibe with the results of independent studies, those published by both Germany and Sweden are fishy, in some cases betraying an apparent effort by officials to massage the numbers to avoid certain uncomfortable facts. While an independent survey, for example, concludes that right-wing extremists make up a small minority of perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence in Germany, German police statistics blame most such violence on just right-wingers. Enstad, in his polite way, suggests that this discrepancy is the result of “a categorisation problem.” Could it be possible, Enstad wonders, that “German police considers antisemitism a right-wing type of ideology and thus categorises most anti-Semitic attacks as right-wing, regardless of the perpetrator’s ethnic or religious background?” Another problem is that German officials categorize some incidents — including the fire-bombing of a synagogue — as anti-Israeli, not anti-Semitic.